Smith's new NHL franchise adds to SLC's growing sports scene

Brice Wallace
Utah Business Journal

When it comes to major-league sports, Utah has scored a proverbial hat trick.

With the move of the Arizona Coyotes executives, coaches and players to Salt Lake City, the state will have three big-league teams, with the as-yet-unnamed new NHL team joining the NBA’s Utah Jazz and Major League Soccer’s Real Salt Lake.

At a news conference announcing the new team, owner Ryan Smith talked about renovating the Delta Center to accommodate hockey, adding more than 40 nights of hockey each winter to the downtown sports landscape, and having the opportunity to “reimagine” downtown Salt Lake City.

Smith said he originally leaned toward building a new arena but he and government leaders at all levels came to agree on a different plan. “Really, I think we’ve all decided that there’s one moment here to reimagine what our downtown experience is in Salt Lake,” said Smith, whose Smith Entertainment Group will own and control the new team.

The Coyotes could not resolve arena issues in Arizona, opening the opportunity for Smith to have a team in Utah. The Arizona franchise became inactive and the NHL Board of Governors voted to establish a team in Utah that will be neither a relocated team nor an expansion franchise. It will start play in the 2024-25 season.

Smith acknowledged that it would have been easier to build an arena on “a blank piece of land down south,” because Smith Entertainment Group “does a lot better on 100 acres with 5,000 housing units than it does on two city blocks.”

But talk of building a new arena, or even separate arenas, for the Jazz and the NHL team in downtown Salt Lake City gave way to a plan to convert the Delta Center to a site for both sports.

“Downtowns are not having their strongest moment across the U.S., to say the least,” Smith said. “The Jazz probably go where hockey goes, if we’re going to be honest. Very few people would try to operate two arenas. We want it all to be together and we want it all to be downtown. … It’s not about the arena and the renovation. It’s just not. It’s about everything else around it and something we can all be proud of. … I think it’s exciting, and I can’t wait to kind of show the plans on how we’re going to do it.”

As for the in-arena experience, Smith described the Delta Center as having “great bones” and having undergone a relatively recent renovation. It seats up to 18,306 people for Jazz games but Smith said plans are in place for an arena with a 17,500 capacity that does not compromise the basketball experience. The changes for hockey could take a couple of years, starting with seating for 16,200 — 12,000 of which “will have perfect views,” he said.

At the time of the news conference, about 22,700 people had made deposits on hockey season tickets. Jazz season ticket holders will be given priority access to NHL Utah season tickets.

As for the outside-the-arena experience, Smith said activity in the city blocks near the arena is “actually way more important for me than building a new arena.”

Not only does he want the 70 former Coyote staff members and players to live near the arena, “I want us to be able to have families come at 3 o’clock to a game and stay after and hang out until midnight, and this is the vehicle to go do that,” he said. “Another 40 nights [of games] a year helps that.”

He’s also hoping that other downtown assets, including the Salt Palace Convention Center, “flow together a little bit better.”

He’s not alone. Salt Lake County Mayor Jenny Wilson hinted at pending large-impact alterations.

“I think about the visitor economy, people who love to come to Utah, to have an additional 40-some-odd games and enliven downtown, everything that we’re going to be rolling out soon to share about changes in downtown that just make it more exciting and really take us to the next level, in sport, entertainment and the visitor economy,” she said at the news conference.

Several speakers said getting everything ready before the team’s first game will be a challenge. “This has been complex to-date and will be complex to come, Wilson said. “There’s a lot to be done.” Smith described it as “just a heavy lift.”

NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman acknowledged the difficulty of the task but said Ryan and Ashley Smith are up for it. “They’ve got the smarts, the energy, the talent to pull it off, and we believe that or we would never have dared to try to do this with them,” he said.

Ashley Smith, co-owner of Smith Entertainment Group with her husband, said “we are up to the task of being stewards of this team. … We’re ready for the challenge.”

While the Smiths had been working for a couple of years to try to land an expansion NHL franchise, getting a team this quickly has been a whirlwind of activity. Bettman said the idea for moving the team from Phoenix to Salt Lake City was first broached with the Coyotes team owner March 6.

Still, “we are not overdue to get another team,” said Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall. “We are absolutely at least ready for this. It’s a natural next step here in the state of Utah.”

Ryan Smith said the team will be “a community asset.”

“We deserve this. We’re going to do well with it,” he said, cautioning that people should not expect perfection from him or others. “We won’t get it right the first time,” he said, “but we’ll get it right, and we’re going to need everyone.”

Bettman said Utah has many attributes the NHL desires when considering a site for an expansion team: a strong market, an arena, good ownership and a team that will make the league stronger.

“We knew that Utah is, like, No. 1 in every category you can come up with: economy, employment, quality of life, happy people — you name it. … We knew that, and knew we want to be here,” he said, adding that it also is a place “where we thought we could be successful immediately.”

Gov. Spencer Cox lauded the group effort that led to “just an epic day here in Utah.”

“There were a thousand ways for this not to happen, a thousand ways that this could’ve gone wrong, and almost did go wrong,” Cox said. “So many people came together to find a way to make this work.”

The new team will be labeled “Utah” while the team decides on a name, logo and colors. The Coyotes franchise can be reactivated if it can resolve its stadium issues in Arizona within five years.

Unknown is what effect a Salt Lake City NHL team will have on the Utah Grizzlies, an East Coast Hockey League team that plays at the Maverik Center in West Valley City. The Colorado Avalanche affiliate issued a statement welcoming the NHL to Salt Lake City. “We are excited to see hockey continue to grow,” the Grizzlies said. “The future has never been brighter for the Beehive State.”